Listening For The Holy Heartbeat

August 18, 2024 - Ecclesiastes 3: 1-15

When Parker’s grandfather died, we inherited a clock from his watch-loving home that is over 100 years old. It seems content in the living room of our over 100-year-old house. And in the winter or the middle of the night or early in the morning or really whatever quiet moment I can find, I take solace in its steady beat, ticking the time away as its gravity pulled pendulum moving weight slowly falls. Not everyone likes the sound of a clock. It can remind us that our life is fleeting or that deadline we’re not looking forward to is approaching faster than we’d like. And sometimes I feel like that, too. But the steady beat of this antique machinery conveys a sturdiness to me that seems to have only a partial relationship to the way we humans measure time.  

Time and the fleeting nature of life are a major interest for the writer of Ecclesiastes.  “All is vanity,” this book claims over 25 times. The Hebrew word is hevel which can also be translated absurdity, meaninglessness, vapor. “All is vapor.” All our human efforts are passing, fleeting, changing.

That can be a scary thought. Many of us humans tend to like control. We want to know we matter, and we often like to reassure ourselves of that by assuring ourselves that what we do has a long-lasting impact. But I think the truth is it does and it doesn’t. Yes, it matters if we are kind and loving. Yes, our love endures beyond us for all time. Most of the Bible encourages humans toward a big expansive loving way of life. At the same time, at least if we buy into the wisdom of this particular book of the Bible, in the perspective of eternity, what we do has only fleeting impact and will blow away on the wind like the dust that we are made of.  

Maybe that’s scary. But I think it’s also freeing. Because, we are limited humans, bound to make mistakes. For any of us who tend toward overthinking so many of our decisions and actions, we may find a certain freedom in the perspective of eternity that Ecclesiastes takes.  

In remembering the shortness of my life in the scheme of even human history and remembering the smallness of my being in the scheme of a vast universe, I can put into perspective both my failures and my successes. There is a freedom and a comfort there for me that allows me not to decide nothing matters but rather allows me to serve what I do think matters to the best of my ability, accepting I have little control to make things happen just the way I wish they would.  

What does it mean after all if there is a time for all the things listed in today’s scripture text? Are they a bingo card or a checklist for living? Is it a prescription that we do all the things there is a time for? Or is it more a description of the way life seems to be? That’s where I’d put my money if I had to guess. What makes sense to me is that the writer is describing the way seasons change and how that is so often beyond our control. I’d also be willing to bet I’m not alone in this room in having enjoyed Marvel’s TV series Loki, in which the TVA or Time Variance Authority protects something called the Sacred Timeline. All variants to the prescribed timeline are pruned, destroyed, sent away. Everything must proceed just as ordained or else intolerable chaos will ensue. What a delicious story setting then for Loki, the God of mischief in both Norse and Marvel comic legend.  

Keeping things under control and proceeding in a prescribed way has had an allure for humans for millennia. The problem –in real life and this fictional universe– turns out to be loving places, things, and people that don’t fit the prescription or being places, things, and people who don’t fit the prescription either.

We are all some kind of variant whether we like it or not. Despite our best efforts, we will mess things up, we will not meet someone’s expectations –reasonable or not– and tragedies will befall us beyond our control. “What gain have the workers from their toil?” asks the writer of this text, “...I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.”  

In the Church of the Brethren, where fondly remembered elder Dan West famously swore, he would not eat cake while others went hungry, maybe this line about eating and drinking and pleasure doesn’t land too comfortably at first. Does this writer not know about all the hardships in the world? Does the writer not care? I think it's more likely the writer had seen enough hardship to know it to be as inevitable as the end of life. I think it's more likely the writer is encouraging the audience to rejoice in life and be good to each other despite the reality of hardship. The very fact that life is so fleeting, reminds us that it is a precious, holy gift to be celebrated.  

Some of us may have been reminded of this at the start of the school year or by noticing how loudly the cicadas are singing about the waning summer or by hitting a limit of time, energy, or health unexpectedly.  It’s normal in those moments to experience grief or discomfort. What I think the writer of Ecclesiastes calls us to is also a sense of aware gratitude for these precious numbered days in the scheme of eternity. Oddly, I have so often found that in embracing that finitude I catch a glimpse of the infiniteness that surrounds us all – that so many of us call God.  

And I hear Ecclesiastes agreeing in lines like “That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.” I don’t know what this will sound like to you but somehow it seems to me when I can slow down enough to notice time passing or notice my smallness in the vastness of the universe, I can find comfort in the ways I am connected to the unending flow of time and the infinite wash of existence through all of which God surely moves – as if God is the one big heartbeat of being from which we can never really be separate.  

In times when I worry about things outside of my control or find myself reaching limits and realities I’d rather not run up against, I try to remember to listen for that holy heartbeat that holds us all. In doing so, I sometimes find I can regain my own healthy rhythm. I do this when I listen to the goldfinches singing in my elm tree or the clock on my living room wall or when I’m lucky, the crashes of Lake Michigan – so much bigger than me – washing up against its own rocky shore.  

God goes on forever, and I believe we will never truly be apart from that one big heartbeat. And yet, this life we live now is fleeting. I want to count precious each morsel of sand that falls through the hourglass of our own variant, flawed, and beautiful lives. I want to know that grateful attention to be a kind of prayer.

–the kind of prayer that Mary Oliver writes about in her poem,

“The Summer Day,” which I believe bears a strong kinship to the wisdom of the writer of Ecclesiastes and with which I want to leave you today.  

“Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean —

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

What is it you plan to do indeed?

Hallelujah. Amen.